LAS VEGAS—I used to worship at the church of the ThinkPad. IBM's designs may have been a little conservative, but for me they epitomized everything that a laptop should be. Well specced, well built, with a seriousness to their styling that I always appreciated.

But over the past few years I've felt that Lenovo had lost touch with what made the ThinkPad great. ThinkPads should be predictable, functional business machines, and so "innovations" such as weird keyboard layouts and the removal of the TrackPoint buttons left me out in the cold. They were making my beloved laptops worse, and I was despondent.

But Lenovo's new iteration of its ThinkPad X1 Carbon line has sparked my passion once more. The Broadwell U-powered system looks like it's a return to form for the ThinkPad line, and I am ridiculously excited by a business laptop.

On the inside, its specs are more or less in line with other Broadwell U systems: processors up to the Core i7-5600U, 4 or 8GB RAM, up to 512GB of PCIe-attached SSD. The 14-inch system has three screen options: 1920×1080 TN non-touch, 2560×1440 IPS non-touch, and 2560×1440 IPS touch. Systems will weigh about 2.8lbs, and battery life is estimated at just under 11 hours and will support 80 percent charging in just one hour.

But those are mere details. The important news? Gone are the weird "dynamic" software function keys of the previous generation X1 Carbon; Lenovo has reinstated the proper hardware keys. The previous X1's strange split Home/End key, positioned where Caps Lock should be? Eliminated. The keyboard may not quite reach the glory days of the X300/X220 series, but it nonetheless has a much more conventional layout and behavior.

Better yet, the TrackPoint buttons have been reinstated. The red button in the middle of the keyboard is the hallmark of all true ThinkPads, and its aficionados, myself included, regard it as one of the finest mobile pointing devices ever created. Recent ThinkPads, however, have reduced its ease of use by eliminating the dedicated hardware buttons for left/middle/right click, instead using invisible buttons integrated into the touchpad. This made the buttons harder to hit and generally reduced ease of use.

The new X1 Carbon brings them back, making the TrackPoint the awesome pointing device that it should be.

I think the X1 Carbon looks good, because it looks like a ThinkPad. The keyboard felt nice, the TrackPoint buttons feel great, and while it's a 14-inch system, the form factor and weight are closer to those of a 13-inch machine. It's clear that Lenovo has listened to the complaints about the old version, and the resultant improvement is enormous.

The full range of ThinkPad X1 Carbon systems won't be available until later in the year, though at least one model is available to order now; the base model runs $1,199 for a Core i5-5200U, the 1920×1080 non-touch screen, 4GB RAM, and 128GB SSD.